The Yeon family compound has seventeen rooms I am allowed to move through freely, and three I am not.
The three are: my father's private study, the archive room where the family's legal documents are stored, and a small room at the north end of the east wing that has been locked for as long as I have lived in this body. When I was young, in the memories that came with Yeon Seo's life, I asked Madam Sohn about it once. She said it was a storage room. She said it without meeting my eyes, which in my experience as someone who spends a great deal of time watching people means it was not a storage room.
I have been aware of this room for four years. I have not tested it because I did not yet have a tool that would tell me anything.
Now I do.
On a morning when my father is at a council meeting and Hana is at a fitting for something I have not been told about and the household is running its regular patterns, I walk to the north end of the east wing and I stand in front of the locked door and I send a thread of spiritual fire into the wood.
The fire reads the room through the door the way it reads everything: by what the energy in the space remembers.
The room is not a storage room. The room is where my mother used to practice.
This lands in my chest in a way I was not prepared for. Not Yeon Seo's grief exactly, which is muted now, two years dead and further blurred by my own presence in the body. Something more complicated. A woman I never met, in a life I didn't start, left evidence of herself in a locked room in a house that no longer mentions her except when Madam Sohn says I have her eyes.
The fire in the room is old and layered. She practiced here regularly over a long period. Spiritual fire, not the weak household-blessing variety. Stronger. The residue has the character of someone who knew what they were doing.
I stand in the corridor for a long time.
My mother had a genuine spiritual fire ability. Strong enough to leave this much residue after ten years. Nobody mentioned this. My father, who has a minor household-blessing level of ability himself, has a locked room full of evidence that his late wife was significantly more gifted than he is, and the room has been locked since she died, and nobody has told me.
Why lock it?
I send the fire deeper and I look for the answer.
What I find is a ward.
It is old and it is careful and it was placed on the room from the outside, on the door and the walls, not by my mother but by someone else. The energy signature is unfamiliar, not my father's thin household variety, something stronger and more structured. Professional.
Someone warded this room after my mother died. Someone wanted the residue contained.
I pull my fire back and I stand in the corridor and I think about this with the specific cold clarity that I have learned to call up when something is too large to react to before I understand it.
My mother had a strong spiritual fire ability. She is dead. Her practice room has been sealed by someone with professional warding skills. My father does not talk about her. Her ability is not mentioned in any conversation I have observed in four years of listening carefully.
The system is very quiet.
I go back to my room and I sit at my writing desk.
"What do you know about my mother," I say.
The system takes longer than usual to respond.
YEON MIN-HA. BORN YEAR 847 OF THE HWANGEUK CALENDAR. DIED YEAR 862. CAUSE OF DEATH: RECORDED AS ILLNESS. NOTE: THE SYSTEM HAS INCOMPLETE INFORMATION ON THIS SUBJECT. FURTHER NOTE: THE SYSTEM'S INCOMPLETE INFORMATION ON THIS SUBJECT IS ITSELF INFORMATIVE.
"You're saying someone limited what information you have access to."
THE SYSTEM NOTES THAT IT CANNOT CONFIRM OR DENY THIS. THE SYSTEM ALSO NOTES THAT ITS INFORMATION ON MOST SUBJECTS IS REASONABLY COMPREHENSIVE AND ITS INFORMATION ON YEON MIN-HA IS NOT.
I look at this panel for a long time.
My mother died when I was four. I have one inherited memory of her: a warmth, a voice, nothing specific enough to build on. But she had a real ability. She practiced it. Her practice room was warded shut after her death by someone who was not my father.
Illness, the record says.
I think about the three people who have died in the past five years with no mark, no wound, no obvious cause, their spiritual fire simply gone. Esen Vex. Marcus Webb's analog in this world. Corvin Ash's analog.
Then I stop, because I am mixing up my lives, and the people in those other stories are not real and the woman in the locked room is, or was.
I breathe through my nose.
My mother had an unusual ability. She is dead of recorded illness. Her room is sealed. The information about her is thin.
I do not have enough to draw a conclusion. I have enough to know there is a conclusion to draw.
I write it at the top of a new page in the private notebook I keep in a locked box under my writing desk: What happened to Mother?
Below it I write everything I found in the room and everything the system told me and everything I know about the ward's energy signature.
Then I go to calligraphy practice, because my tutor is coming in an hour and the calligraphy has not been going to improve itself.
But the question sits in me for the rest of the day, and it does not go away.
FOUR YEARS REMAINING, the system says, that evening.
"I know," I say. "I have more than one clock now."